Wall of Fame

Christmas Tree

Case Study

Idea #7

CUNNING created a 50ft floating Christmas tree made up of the fibreglass cars used in “guerrilla parking”. Across the festive season for two weeks the tree travelled up and down the Thames to the delight of passers-by and the media. Even Tower Bridge opened especially for us.

Background

CUNNING worked with MINI for four years from launch as their retained brand experience and ambient agency. In that time, we created award-winning activity that broke the traditional car advertising mould and set new standards in car marketing.

Brief

An interesting and unusual aspect of the MINI launch was that it did not follow the usual car launch practice of big media spend up front with TV and posters. Instead, it followed the ‘adoption curve’: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and lastly Laggards. However this was not due to a limited budget. It just fit perfectly with the overall strategy of creating desire around the car, launching as a style brand with style influencers. WCRS had already created the brand positioning of “It’s a MINI adventure”. CUNNING’s brief was to find an approach that reinforced that positioning whilst going beyond what was expected - to capture the imagination of style influencers and the non-motoring media to direct traffic to the website, to generate leads and to ultimately drive sales.

Wider Campaign Results

As part of the wider MINI campaign, devised by CUNNING, many of the marketing activities received consumer press coverage. In total 7.1 million impacts were achieved in a variety of titles including The Sun, Creative Review, BBC News, Evening Standard and Auto Express.

The launch year activity gave MINI huge word-of mouth with the style-influencers target audience and the work was a huge success. The work is now taught in BA Marketing programmes in both the UK and the US.